In the change of religion, care was taken to render the transit from falsehood to truth as little violent as possible. Though the first proselytes were kings, it does not appear that there was any persecution. It was a precept of Pope Gregory, under whose auspices this mission was conducted, that the heathen temples should not be destroyed, especially where they were well built; but that, first removing the idols, they should be consecrated anew by holier rites, and to better purposes (Bed. Hist. Eccl. l. i. c. 30.), in order that the prejudices of the people might not be too rudely shocked by a declared profanation of what they had so long held sacred; and that everywhere beholding the same places, to which they had formerly resorted for religious comfort, they might be gradually reconciled to the new doctrines and ceremonies which were there introduced; and as the sacrifices used in the Pagan worship were always attended with feasting, and consequently were highly grateful to the multitude, the pope ordered, that oxen should as usual be slaughtered near the church, and the people indulged in their ancient festivity. (Id. c. eod.) Whatever popular customs of heathenism were found to be absolutely not incompatible with Christianity were retained; and some of them were continued to a very late period. Deer were at a certain season brought into St. Paul's Church in London, and laid on the altar (Dugdale's History of St. Paul's.); and this custom subsisted until the Reformation. The names of some of the church festivals were, with a similar design, taken from those of the heathen, which had been celebrated at the same time of the year. Nothing could have been more prudent than these regulations; they were indeed formed from a perfect understanding of human nature.
Whilst the inferior people were thus insensibly led into a better order, the example and countenance of the great completed the work. For the Saxon kings and ruling men embraced religion with so signal, and in their rank so unusual, a zeal, that in many instances they even sacrificed to its advancement the prime objects of their ambition. Wulfere, king of the West Saxons, bestowed the Isle of Wight on the king of Sussex, to persuade him to embrace Christianity. (Bed. Hist. Eccl. l. iv. c. 13.) This zeal operated in the same manner in favour of their instructors. The greatest kings and conquerors frequently resigned their crowns, and shut themselves up in monasteries. When kings became monks, a high lustre was reflected upon the monastic state, and great credit accrued to the power of their doctrine, which was able to produce such extraordinary effects upon persons, over whom religion has commonly the slightest influence.
The zeal of the missionaries was also much assisted by their superiority in the arts of civil life. At their first preaching in Sussex, that country was reduced to the greatest distress from a drought, which had continued for three years. The barbarous inhabitants, destitute of any means to alleviate the famine, in an epidemic transport of despair frequently united forty and fifty in a body, and joining their hands, precipitated themselves from the cliffs, and were either drowned or dashed to pieces on the rocks. Though a maritime people, they knew not how to fish; and this ignorance probably arose from a remnant of Druidical superstition, which had forbidden the use of that sort of diet. In this calamity, Bishop Wilfred, their first preacher, collecting nets, at the head of his attendants, plunged into the sea; and having opened this great resource of food, he reconciled the desperate people to life, and their minds to the spiritual care of those who had shown themselves so attentive to their temporal preservation. (Bed. Hist. Eccl. l. iv. c. 13.) The same regard to the welfare of the people appeared in all their actions. The Christian kings sometimes made donations to the church of lands conquered from their heathen enemies. The clergy immediately baptized and manumitted their new vassals. Thus they endeared to all sorts of men doctrines and teachers, which could mitigate the rigorous law of conquest; and they rejoiced to see religion and liberty advancing with an equal progress. Nor were the monks in this time in anything more worthy of their praise than in their zeal for personal freedom. In the canon, wherein they provided against the alienation of their lands, among other charitable exceptions to this restraint, they particularize the purchase of liberty. (Spelm. Concil. Page 329.) In their transactions with the great the same point was always strenuously laboured. When they imposed penance, they were remarkably indulgent to persons of that rank. But they always made them purchase the remission of corporal austerity by acts of beneficence. They urged their powerful penitents to the enfranchisement of their own slaves, and to the redemption of those which belonged to others; they directed them to the repair of highways, and to the construction of churches, bridges, and other works of general utility. (Instauret etiam Dei ecclesiam; et instauret vias publicas, pontibus super aquas profundas et super caenosas vias; et manumittat servos suos proprios, et redimat ab aliis hominibus servos suos ad libertatem.—L. Eccl. Edgari 14.) They extracted the fruits of virtue even from crimes, and whenever a great man expiated his private offences, he provided in the same act for the public happiness. The monasteries were then the only bodies corporate in the kingdom; and if any persons were desirous to perpetuate their charity by a fund for the relief of the sick or indigent, there was no other way than to confide this trust to some monastery. The monks were the sole channel, through which the bounty of the rich could pass in any continued stream to the poor; and the people turned their eyes towards them in all their distresses.
We must observe, that the monks of that time, especially those from Ireland (Aidanus Finam et Colmanus mirae sanctitatis fuerunt et parsimoniae. Adeo enim sacerdotes erant illius temporis ab avaritia immunes, ut nec territoria nisi coacti acciperent.—Hen. Hunting. apud Decem. l. iii. page 333. Bed. Hist. Eccl. l. iii. c. 26.), who had a considerable share in the conversion of all the northern parts, did not show that rapacious desire of riches, which long disgraced, and finally ruined, their successors. Not only did they not seek, but seemed even to shun, such donations. This prevented that alarm, which might have arisen from an early and declared avarice. At this time the most fervent and holy anchorites retired to places the furthest that could be found from human concourse and help, to the most desolate and barren situations, which even from their horror seemed particularly adapted to men who had renounced the world. Many persons followed them in order to partake of their instructions and prayers, or to form themselves upon their example. An opinion of their miracles after their death drew still greater numbers. Establishments were gradually made. The monastic life was frugal, and the government moderate. These causes drew a constant concourse. Sanctified deserts assumed a new face; the marshes were drained, and the lands cultivated. And as this revolution seemed rather the effect of the holiness of the place than of any natural causes, it increased their credit; and every improvement drew with it a new donation. In this manner the great abbeys of Croyland and Glastonbury, and many others, from the most obscure beginnings, were advanced to a degree of wealth and splendour little less than royal. In these rude ages, government was not yet fixed upon solid principles, and everything was full of tumult and distraction. As the monasteries were better secured from violence by their character, than any other places by laws, several great men, and even sovereign princes, were obliged to take refuge in convents, who, when by a more happy revolution in their fortunes they were reinstated in their former dignities, thought they could never make a sufficient return for the safety they had enjoyed under the sacred hospitality of these roofs. Not content to enrich them with ample possessions, that others also might partake of the protection they had experienced, they formally erected into an asylum those monasteries, and their adjacent territory. So that all thronged to that refuge, who were rendered unquiet by their crimes, their misfortunes, or the severity of their lords; and content to live under a government, to which their minds were subject, they raised the importance of their masters by their numbers, their labour, and above all, by an inviolable attachment.
The monastery was always the place of sepulture for the greatest lords and kings. This added to the other causes of reverence a sort of sanctity, which, in universal opinion, always attends the repositories of the dead; and they acquired also thereby a more particular protection against the great and powerful; for who would violate the tomb of his ancestors, or his own? It was not an unnatural weakness to think, that some advantage might be derived from lying in holy places, and amongst holy persons: and this superstition was fomented with the greatest industry and art. The monks of Glastonbury spread a notion, that it was almost impossible any person should be damned, whose body lay in their cemetery. This must be considered as coming in aid of the amplest of their resources, prayer for the dead.
But there was no part of their policy, of whatever nature, that procured to them a greater or juster credit, than their cultivation of learning and useful arts. For if the monks contributed to the fall of science in the Roman empire, it is certain, that the introduction of learning and civility into this northern world is entirely owing to their labours. It is true, that they cultivated letters only in a secondary way, and as subsidiary to religion. But the scheme of Christianity is such, that it almost necessitates an attention to many kinds of learning. For the Scripture is by no means an irrelative system of moral and divine truths; but it stands connected with so many histories, and with the laws, opinions, and manners of so many various sorts of people, and in such different times, that it is altogether impossible to arrive to any tolerable knowledge of it, without having recourse to much exterior inquiry. For which reason the progress of this religion has always been marked by that of letters. There were two other circumstances at this time, that contributed no less to the revival of learning. The sacred writings had not been translated into any vernacular language, and even the ordinary service of the church was still continued in the Latin tongue; all, therefore, who formed themselves for the ministry, and hoped to make any figure in it, were in a manner driven to the study of the writers of polite antiquity, in order to qualify themselves for their most ordinary functions. By this means a practice, liable in itself to great objections, had a considerable share in preserving the wrecks of literature; and was one means of conveying down to our times those inestimable monuments, which otherwise, in the tumult of barbarous confusion on one hand, and untaught piety on the other, must inevitably have perished. The second circumstance, the pilgrimages of that age, if considered in itself, was as liable to objection as the former; but it proved of equal advantage to the cause of literature. A principal object of these pious journeys was Rome, which contained all the little that was left in the western world, of ancient learning and taste. The other great object of those pilgrimages was Jerusalem; this led them into the Grecian empire, which still subsisted in the East with great majesty and power. Here the Greeks had not only not discontinued the ancient studies, but they added to the stock of arts many inventions of curiosity and convenience that were unknown to antiquity. When, afterwards, the Saracens prevailed in that part of the world, the pilgrims had also, by the same means, an opportunity of profiting from the improvements of that laborious people; and however little the majority of these pious travellers might have had such objects in their view, something useful must unavoidably have stuck to them; a few certainly saw with more discernment, and rendered their travels serviceable to their country by importing other things besides miracles and legends. Thus a communication was opened between this remote island and countries, of which it otherwise could then scarcely have heard mention made; and pilgrimages thus preserved that intercourse amongst mankind, which is now formed by politics, commerce, and learned curiosity. It is not wholly unworthy of observation, that Providence, which strongly appears to have intended the continual intermixture of mankind, never leaves the human mind destitute of a principle to effect it. This purpose is sometimes carried on by a sort of migratory instinct, sometimes by the spirit of conquest; at one time avarice drives men from their homes, at another they are actuated by a thirst of knowledge; where none of these causes can operate, the sanctity of particular places attracts men from the most distant quarters. It was this motive which sent thousands in those ages to Jerusalem and Rome; and now, in a full tide, impels half the world annually to Mecca.
By those voyages, the seeds of various kinds of knowledge and improvement were at different times imported into England. They were cultivated in the leisure and retirement of monasteries; otherwise they could not have been cultivated at all: for it was altogether necessary to draw certain men from the general rude and fierce society, and wholly to set a bar between them and the barbarous life of the rest of the world, in order to fit them for study, and the cultivation of arts and science. Accordingly, we find everywhere, in the first institutions for the propagation of knowledge amongst any people, that those, who followed it, were set apart and secluded from the mass of the community.
The great ecclesiastical chair of this kingdom, for near a century, was filled by foreigners; they were nominated by the popes, who were in that age just or politic enough to appoint persons of a merit in some degree adequate to that important charge. Through this series of foreign and learned prelates, continual accessions were made to the originally slender stock of English literature. The greatest and most valuable of these accessions was made in the time and by the care of Theodorus, the seventh archbishop of Canterbury. He was a Greek by birth; a man of a high ambitious spirit, and of a mind more liberal, and talents better cultivated, than generally fell to the lot of the western prelates. He first introduced the study of his native language into this island. He brought with him a number of valuable books in many faculties; and amongst them a magnificent copy of the works of Homer; the most ancient and best of poets, and the best chosen to inspire a people, just initiated into letters, with an ardent love, and with a true taste for the sciences. Under his influence a school was formed at Canterbury; and thus the other the year of our Lord 669.
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